Natasha Hoare on Alice Neel Exhibition at Whitechapel Gallery

The Whitechapel Gallery’s new show of the paintings by Alice Neel struck me as a slightly strange choice of show for a gallery with such a forward thrusting curatorial line. Her figurative oil paintings from the 1930’s – 1980’s stand outside of mainstream art history and criticism. Whilst the big American muscle of her heyday in the 1950’s was in Abstract Expressionism, she was producing a stream of portraits of the cerebral celebrities of her day. Coming so soon after their Elizabeth Payton show, in which wistful watercolours of Jarvis Cocker et al adorned their walls, I wondered if the Whitechapel hadn’t come over all celebrity worshipful.

I am extremely glad, however, that they have decided to give this travelling show a European home. Fresh from exhibition in Huston, Alice’s paintings are beautifully wrought canvas’s which tell the story of the past 100 years of American domestic culture. From labour movements, to Harlem, the Upper East Side and the domestic space, each reveals the turmoil, strain and joy of the times with an honesty and directness. Their lightness of touch and deftness of form is testimony to her incredibly individual and developed painterly skill. Each figure is a transient and immediate rendering of the inner psychology of the sitter – she never sketched or prepared her images, instead marking straight onto the canvas the blue outlines of the figures.


A chief delight of the show is the extent of the collection. The paintings run from the early 1930’s to the 1980’s, and as such the viewer can trace the changes to her style. The gradual effervescence of objects surrounding her sitters is a move toward abstraction. Especially delightful and expressive are the incresingly clunky feet, long fingers, sunken cheeks, wonky eyes, and defined brush strokes of individaul colour – reminicent of Van Gogh.

Her early work is dark and threatening, reflecting her own mental turmoil at the break-up of her marriage, the death of her first born from diphtheria and the removal of her remaining child from her custody. The misery of this disastrous chain of events pushed Alice to the brink, and she tried to commit suicide on a number of occasions. A dark painting of a child caught in the bars of a bed frame is especially unnerving.

Her paintings for the Works Progress Administration are landscape and cityscape based and document an America in the depths of the Great Depression. Extraordinarily for this scheme she and other artists had to produce a canvas a day, of specific dimensions. The frustrations of the scheme are hilariously expressed in one image of the woman who headed up the Easel division which Alice was employed as a pucker mouthed caricature – she was obviously not impressed by the woman who held the fates of fellow artists in her hands – Alice was hired and fired a number of times.

Social injustice and upheaval is communicated clearly in her early work. Her dark and moody portraits of the hero’s of the labour movement in the US and prominent communist agitators earned her a visited by McCarthy spies. When asked if she was a communist herself she asked them if they would sit for a painting they promptly left.

From startling nudes with challenging eyes and honest portraits of exhausted mothers with awkward and overwhelmed children to a show stopping self portrait of the artist herself in the nude in old age, the exhibition is full of arresting images rendered in a stunning and sensitive colour. Of them all her Andy Warhol portrait stands out. His angelic face with eyes closed in contemplation is stunningly juxtaposed with a sagging chest folding in on itself over riven scars from his near fatal shooting by feminist Valerie Solanas. The corset which held his frail frame together is a shocking revelation for a man who lived his life as a polished emblem of art world style.

See the show at the Whitechapel Galley, until 17th September.
Natasha Hoare's review first appeared on Chance Collective.